Jaime B. Palter

• PhD, Duke University
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Rhode Island

Observing air-sea interactions on a global scale is essential for improving Earth system forecasts. Yet these exchanges are challenging to quantify for a range of reasons, including extreme conditions, vast and remote under-sampled locations, requirements for a multitude of co-located variables, and the high variability of fluxes in space and time....

Increasing interest in the deployment of optical oxygen sensors, or optodes, on oceanographic moorings reflects the value of dissolved oxygen (DO) measurements in studies of physical and biogeochemical processes. Optodes are well-suited for moored applications but require careful, multi-step calibrations in the field to ensure data accuracy. Withou...

Monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) refers to the multistep process of monitoring the amount of greenhouse gas removed by a carbon dioxide removal (CDR) activity and reporting the results of the monitoring to a third party. The third party then verifies the reporting of the results. While MRV is usually conducted in pursuit of certificati...

The Northwest Atlantic Shelf and Slope have warmed dramatically in the past decade, changing marine life and challenging fisheries management. A rapid warming event in 2009/2010, linked to a reduced supply of cold water from the Labrador Sea, pushed this region to a new state of unprecedentedly high temperatures that persists today. However, a mech...

This chapter provides a concise overview of the entire monograph by assembling summaries of 10 individual chapters starting with a global review of large-scale, persistent nutrient fronts of the World Ocean followed by regional chapters on the Arctic Ocean, North Atlantic, Baltic Sea, Kuroshio Current, and the Yellow Sea, a global review of CDOM dy...

The oxygen content of the ocean interior largely results from a balance between respiration and advective ventilation, with only a small contribution from mixing processes. However, two important characteristics, which are key to future oxygen distribution in the ocean, primarily depend on the strength of ocean mixing. The first relates to the oxyg...

The Northwest Atlantic Shelf provides ecological and economic benefits along the heavily populated North American coastline and beyond. In 2009-2010, abrupt warming prompted an ecosystem shift with consequences for fisheries, yet the cause of this event is unclear. Here we use satellite altimetry and in situ measurements to show that, in 2008, the...

Memorial University has over the past 15 years been involved in various ocean glider activities with deployments focused primarily on the Newfoundland Shelf and the Labrador Sea. For example, there are four deployments with glider data in the Labrador Sea. Partnerships with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Ocean Gliders Canada have also resulted in...

Plain Language Summary Marine photosynthetic organisms face a unique challenge: They are confined to the ocean's near‐surface layer where there is sufficient light for photosynthesis, yet the nutrients needed for growth are rapidly stripped from these layers. In response to this nutrient scarcity, some microorganisms, called diazotrophs, evolved th...

Labrador Sea Water (LSW) is a major component of the deep limb of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, yet LSW transport pathways and their variability lack a complete description. A portion of the LSW exported from the subpolar gyre is advected eastward along the North Atlantic Current and must contend with the Mid‐Atlantic Ridge befor...

The Eastern Tropical North Atlantic Oxygen Minimum Zone (OMZ) is a biogeochemically important area. The low oxygen in this region is thought to be maintained by a balance between the slow mixing supply of O2 and its removal by respiration. We use data from 90 isopycnal RAFOS floats to characterize the mixing coefficients responsible for the supply...

Ocean boundary current systems are key components of the climate system, are home to highly productive ecosystems, and have numerous societal impacts. Establishment of a global network of boundary current observing systems is a critical part of ongoing development of the Global Ocean Observing System. The characteristics of boundary current systems...

Global observations show that the ocean lost approximately 2% of its oxygen inventory over the past five decades1–3, with important implications for marine ecosystems4,5. The rate of change varies regionally, with northwest Atlantic coastal waters showing a long-term drop6,7 that vastly outpaces the global and North Atlantic basin mean deoxygenatio...

Horizontal transport at the boundaries of the subtropical gyres plays a crucial role in providing the nutrients that fuel gyre primary productivity, the heat that helps restratify the surface mixed layer, and the dissolved inorganic carbon that influences air-sea carbon exchange. Mesoscale eddies may be an important component of these horizontal tr...

Substantial amounts of nitrogen fixation occur in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, due to the activity of cyanobacteria with high iron requirements. Iron is delivered to this region by dust from the Sahara Desert. However, this dust deposition is typically localized and episodic. Therefore, other sources of iron may also be important. Here, we...

The Paris Agreement has initiated a scientific debate on the role that carbon removal – or net negative emissions – might play in achieving less than 1.5 K of global mean surface warming by 2100. Here, we probe the sensitivity of a comprehensive Earth system model (GFDL-ESM2M) to three different atmospheric CO2 concentration pathways, two of which...

A decline in global ocean oxygen concentrations has been observed over the twentieth century and is predicted to continue under future climate change. We use a unique modeling framework to understand how the perturbed ocean circulation may influence the rate of ocean deoxygenation in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 and associated global w...

Transport of freshwater from the Labrador Shelf into the interior Labrador Sea has the potential to impact deep convection via its influence on the salinity of surface waters. To examine this transport, the authors deployed two underwater gliders on a mission to traverse the continental shelf break multiple times between 5 July and 22 August 2014,...

The Paris Climate Agreement has initiated a scientific debate on the role that carbon removal – or net negative emissions – might play in achieving less than 1.5 K of global mean surface warming by 2100. Here, we probe the sensitivity of a comprehensive Earth System Model to three different atmospheric CO2 concentration pathways, two of which arriv...

Oleander Workshop II: 25 Years of Operations; Narragansett, Rhode Island, 26–27 October 2016

During each of the dramatic global warmings that ended the Pleistocene ice ages, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) was disrupted. It is not clear whether this was a contributing cause, or simply an effect of deglaciation. Here, we show that, in an ensemble of simulations with a global climate model, AMOC disruption causes a con...

Changes to the large-scale oceanic circulation are thought to slow the pace of transient climate change due, in part, to their influence on radiative feedbacks. Here we evaluate the interactions between CO2-forced perturbations to the large-scale ocean circulation and the radiative cloud feedback in a climate model. Both the change of the ocean cir...

Satellite views of the ocean have suggested a decline of the subpolar North Atlantic surface circulation during the 1990s and 2000s. This was a period of unprecedented observational capacity in the basin, thanks to the presence of many hundreds of profiling floats. We use more than 40,000 subsurface displacements of these floats to characterize the...

Northern Hemisphere climate responds sensitively to multidecadal variability in North Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST). It is therefore surprising that an imprint of such variability is conspicuously absent in wintertime western European temperature, despite that Europe's climate is strongly influenced by its neighbouring ocean, where multide...

Supplementary Figures 1-7 and Supplementary References.

This study examines the role of processes transporting tracers across the Polar Front (PF) in the depth interval between the surface and major topographic sills, which this study refers to as the PF core. A preindustrial control simulation of an eddying climate model coupled to a biogeochemical model [GFDL Climate Model, version 2.6 (CM2.6)- simpli...

Ships and ocean-observing robots have been used to quantify the amount of nutrients that a storm brings up from the Stygian ocean depths to the sunlit surface [mdash] a first step in assessing how storms affect oceanic biomass production.

Using a novel Lagrangian approach, we assess the relative roles of the atmosphere and ocean in setting interannual variability in western European wintertime temperatures. We compute sensible and latent heat fluxes along atmospheric particle trajectories backtracked in time from four western European cities, using a Lagrangian atmospheric dispersio...

The Gulf Stream carries the warm, poleward return flow of the wind-driven North Atlantic subtropical gyre and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. This northward flow drives a significant meridional heat transport. Various lines of evidence suggest that Gulf Stream heat transport profoundly influences the climate of the entire Northern...

A climate model is used to investigate the influence of Weddell Sea open ocean deep convection on anthropogenic and natural carbon uptake for the period 1860-2100. In a three-member ensemble climate change simulation, convection ceases on average by year 1981, weakening the net oceanic cumulative uptake of atmospheric CO2 by year 2100 (-4.3 Pg C) r...

We provide an assessment of sea level simulated in a suite of global ocean-sea ice models using the interannual CORE atmospheric state to determine surface ocean boundary buoyancy and momentum fluxes. These CORE-II simulations are compared amongst themselves as well as to observation-based estimates. We focus on the final 15 years of the simulation...

In 1974, newly available satellite observations unveiled the presence of a giant ice-free area, or polynya, within the Antarctic ice pack of the Weddell Sea, which persisted during the two following winters . Subsequent research showed that deep convective overturning had opened a conduit between the surface and the abyssal ocean, and had maintaine...

Ocean Sciences Meeting 2014 poster

Despite slow rates of ocean mixing, observational and modeling studies suggest that buoyancy is redistributed to all depths of the ocean on surprisingly short interannual to decadal time scales. The mechanisms responsible for this redistribution remain poorly understood. This work uses an Earth system model to evaluate the global steady-state ocean...

The separate impacts of wind stress, buoyancy fluxes, and CO2 solubility on the oceanic storage of natural carbon are assessed in an ensemble of twentieth- to twenty-first-century simulations, using a coupled atmosphere–ocean–carbon cycle model. Time-varying perturbations for surface wind stress, temperature, and salinity are calculated from the di...

This chapter identifies and describes the large-scale nutrient fronts that span the width of basins and explores the processes that maintain these fronts and those that act against them. In particular, we investigate the nutrient fronts that ring the subtropical gyres and propose that exchange across these fronts represents a critical pathway for n...

Interannual chlorophyll variability and its driving mechanisms are evaluated in the eastern subtropical North Atlantic, where elevated surface chlorophyll concentrations regularly extend more than 1500 km into the central subtropical North Atlantic and modulate the areal extent of the North Atlantic's lowest chlorophyll waters. We first characteriz...

Tectonically-active gateways between ocean basins have modified ocean circulation over Earth history. Today, the Atlantic and Pacific are directly connected via the Drake Passage, which forms a barrier to the time-mean geostrophic transport between the subtropics and Antarctica. In contrast, during the warm early Cenozoic era, when Antarctica was i...

The ocean has been the only net sink of anthropogenic CO2 over the last 200 years, removing more than 30% of emitted anthropogenic carbon [Sabine et al., 2004]. The Southern Ocean accounts for up to half of this sink through the formation of various bottom, intermediate and mode water masses [Gruber et al., 2009]. Therefore, understanding the full...

This chapter identifies and describes the large-scale nutrient fronts that span the width of basins and explores the processes that maintain these fronts and those that act against them. In particular, we investigate the nutrient fronts that ring the subtropical gyres and propose that exchange across these fronts represents a critical pathway for n...

The subtropical North Atlantic is considered a hot spot for biological nitrogen fixation, with estimated rates between 1 and 20 × 1011 mol nitrogen fixed annually. However, the region's nutrient reservoir beneath the euphotic zone is so enriched in nitrate relative to phosphate that it is perplexing how fixation might be sustained there. Here, we i...

Recent observational studies linking variability in global ocean productivity with upper ocean warming are based on the paradigm that warming produces a more stable water column which, in turn, inhibits primary productivity for a large fraction of the global ocean, namely the tropics and subtropics. Though seemingly straightforward, this paradigm r...

This paper documents time mean simulation characteristics from the ocean and sea ice components in a new coupled climate model developed at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). The GFDL Climate Model version 3 (CM3) is formulated with effectively the same ocean and sea ice components as the earlier CM2.1 yet with extensive develop...

In the Southern Ocean, mixing and upwelling in the presence of heat and freshwater surface fluxes transform subpycnocline water to lighter densities as part of the upward branch of the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC). One hypothesized impact of this transformation is the restoration of nutrients to the global pycnocline, without which biol...

In the Southern Ocean, mixing and upwelling in the presence of heat and freshwater surface fluxes transform subpycnocline water to lighter densities as part of the upward branch of the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC). One hypothesized impact of this transformation is the restoration of nutrients to the global pycnocline, without which biol...

A major oceanographic field experiment is described, which is designed to observe, quantify, and understand the creation and dispersal of weakly stratified fluid known as “mode water” in the region of the Gulf Stream. Formed in the wintertime by convection driven by the most intense air–sea fluxes observed anywhere over the globe, the role of mode...

1] Along density surfaces, nutrient concentrations in the Gulf Stream are elevated relative to concentrations to either side of the current. We assess the source of these elevated nutrient concentrations in the western boundary current using historical hydrographic data. The analysis is extended to the separated Gulf Stream with four hydrographic s...

Labrador Sea Water (LSW), a dense water mass formed by convection in the subpolar North Atlantic, is an important constituent of the meridional overturning circulation. Understanding how the water mass enters the deep western boundary current (DWBC), one of the primary pathways by which it exits the subpolar gyre, can shed light on the continuity b...

Past studies have shown that surface chlorophyll-a concentrations increase in the wake of hurricanes. Given the reported increase in the intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes in recent years, increasing chlorophyll-a concentrations, perhaps an indication of increasing biological productivity, would be an expected consequence. However, in order to...

In the Gulf of Nicoya on the Pacific Coast of Costa Rica, nutrient rich equatorial subsurface water (ESW) is upwelled in much of the lower gulf. These offshore waters are often regarded as the major source of nutrients to the gulf. However, for most of the year, the ESW has little influence on the nutrient content of the upper gulf, which has a dis...

CLIMODE (CLIVAR Mode Water Dynamic Experiment) is a research program designed to understand and quantify the processes responsible for the formation and dissipation of North Atlantic subtropical mode water, also called Eighteen Degree Water (EDW). Among these processes, the amount of buoyancy loss at the ocean-atmosphere interface is still uncertai...

CLIMODE (the CLivar MOde water Dynamics Experiment) is currently investigating the key processes in forming and destroying the subtropical mode water (STMW) of the North Atlantic subtropical gyre. In conjunction with the examination of these physical processes, we have added nutrient analyses to the project in order to assess the role of the STMW i...

Though critically important in sustaining the ocean's biological pump, the cycling of nutrients in the subtropical gyres is poorly understood. The supply of nutrients to the sunlit surface layer of the ocean has traditionally been attributed solely to vertical processes. However, horizontal advection may also be important in establishing the availa...

The ocean's ability to act as a sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide is subject to considerable spatial and temporal variability. Not least of the causes of this variability is the strength of the biological pump, which is critically dependent on the physical supply of nutrients from the subsurface ocean to the euphotic zone. Using hydrographic data...

Many geoscience departments share a similar set of challenges that limit undergraduate and graduate training alike: shrinking undergraduate class enrollments and majors, a lack of classes that introduce laboratory and field-based methods of inquiry, and, as a result, a shortage of training opportunities for graduate students in the design and instr...

Dissertation Using a combination of hydrographic data and the trajectories and profiles of isobaric floats, this dissertation evaluates the connections between remote regions in the North Atlantic. First, I establish that the production and advection of the North Atlantic Subtropical Mode Water (STMW) introduces spatial and temporal variability in...